Book Review | The Straight Razor Cure / Low Town by Daniel Polansky

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In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its champion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs. Every day is a constant hustle to find new customers and protect his turf from low-life competition like Tancred the Harelip and Ling Chi, the enigmatic crime lord of the heathens. 

The Warden's life of drugged iniquity is shaken by his discovery of a murdered child down a dead-end street... setting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. As a former agent with Black House - the secret police - he knows better than anyone that murder in Low Town is an everyday thing, the kind of crime that doesn't get investigated. To protect his home, he will take part in a dangerous game of deception between underworld bosses and the psychotic head of Black House, but the truth is far darker than he imagines. In Low Town, no one can be trusted. 

***

You go to Low Town to score, be it drink or drugs or a whore. You go to Low Town to buy an hour that'll last you a lifetime, in the company of a beautiful woman with pools of night where her eyes should be; for a few ochres, she can be yours. And providing you have the pocket for it, all comers are welcome to sup their troubles away at the Staggering Earl, or in any one of the innumerable other dens of iniquity dotted about Low Town.


Perhaps you're only looking for vials of pixie's breath to feed your habit, or twists of dreamvine to take the edge off a hard day's night. Well sure! Some shady-looking dealer will set you up - for a price. In "the boil on the ass of Rigus that is Low Town, stewing in all its fetid glory," (p.70) everything can be bought, and everything sold. You come to this squalid, impoverished district to score, but you stay at your peril.


Yet Low Town provides. Just as it has provided for a once-was war hero who lived with "mad abandon" (p.129) in the district in his youth. Now, all growed up and nowhere else to go, fallen from such grace as he could have be had as an agent of Black House, the Warden's swapped sides to provide for it in return. His years with the frost firmly behind him, these days he controls the flow of vices in and out from Low Town, and if he's not a bad man, exactly, he's also far from a good one. Then one day the Warden finds the body of a little girl - marked, molested, murdered - and he must decide, once and for all, where his allegiances truly lie.


So begins Daniel Polanski's dirty, filthy, brilliant debut. Indeed, so it continues.


The Straight Razor Cure, known rather less subversively as Low Town in the States, is a phenomenal first novel from a young American author with enough raw talent to make washed-up wretches of us all. It's not a perfect debut - some uneven pacing and the lack of a single, distinct voice blunts the impact of Polansky's noirish fantasy some - but near as damn it, and that's no mean feat.


Unnamed throughout the novel - not that, credit to him, the author makes a thing of this particular mystery - the Warden makes for a fine anti-hero: ugly and largely unvarnished, markedly older than the norm for such characters, capable of terrible things but cognizant of his moral decrepitude. However the Warden does not deserve the shitstorm he's swept up in after he takes ownership of the dead girl's unsolved murder, above and beyond the call of duty - for he has no duty, in truth, and only a little honour. Yet he does this one decent thing, and is made to pay dearly for it.


In such a way Polansky engenders in the reader sympathy for this dithering devil, and it is enough to see one through the hunt at the dark heart of The Straight Razor Cure; the hunt for justice, for a sadistic serial killer and latterly "something loose in Low Town that was spat out from the heart of the void." (p.67) A thing of awful beauty has come to town, you see, leaving the broken bodies of babes in its wake, and the question becomes: who called it here, and why?


Speaking of awful beauty, says the Warden of an ice-cold scryer at the beck and call of Black House, "She would never be called beautiful - there was too much bone where one hoped to find flesh - but she might have sneaked into handsome without the scowl that defaced her finish," (p.151) and I'd assert the very same sentiment of The Straight Razor Cure. Polansky's prose is direct in the mode of Joe Abercrombie, if substantially less terse, but by that same token it is not at all unattractive. To wit:

"Low Town had enjoyed the autumnal pathos, a moment of communal mourning amid the vibrant foliage, but with the mercury falling no one was in any great hurry to leave their houses just to pay sympathy to the family of a little black boy. And anyway, at the rate children were disappearing from Low Town the whole thing had lost its novelty." (pp.255-6)

There are moments of awkwardness here and there, sequences wherein Polansky seems unsure how to go about establishing this thing or that - when it is not the world that trips him up, it is descriptions of the physical characteristics of certain characters - but otherwise the author equips himself remarkably. I had much more fundamental complaints with Scott Lynch's debut, for instance; the same goes for Mark Charan Newton's... even The Blade Itself. With The Straight Razor Cure, Polansky steps straight up to the plate - and with such style!


Whose style that is, exactly, is as yet open to debate. I don't make a habit of making arbitrary comparisons, but add to the three authors already aforementioned in this review the likes of Joe Hill, Tim Lebbon, China Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer... I could go on, too. The Straight Razor Cure reminded me throughout of other - not necessarily better - books, recollecting Perdido Street Station in one marginal aspect as another brought thoughts of The Lies of Locke Lamora. All of which is to say: I don't know that Polansky has as yet come upon his own unique voice. Rather the author draws liberally from the canon of noirish fantasy, appropriating elements from a range of stand-out talents and conjoining them into something almost unrecognisable.


In that last, however, Polansky makes the vast majority of his influences his own. And in any case mine is a minor complaint. Otherwise, The Straight Razor Cure - Low Town to you yanks - seems a darkly sparkling specimen. When one considers that this thrilling murder mystery represents the author's very first flush, its sundry strengths come to far outweigh its fleeting weaknesses. Now that the worldbuilding is done, and the cast of untrustworthy characters established, I can only delight in imagining what Polansky means to do with them next.


The low-down on Low Town, then: it is practically masterful.

***

The Straight Razor Cure / Low Town

by Daniel Polansky

UK Publication: August 2011, Hodder
US Publication: August 2011, Del Rey


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Letters to Editors | Rest In Peace, Pixar

Dear Pixar,

Have I told you lately that I love you?

No, really: I do. You're smart, you're beautiful, you're funny. You have legs and head and heart - the very kind I can get behind. What more could anyone ask from a computer animation studio?

Was it love at first sight? Well, no, not exactly; after all these years I'll admit it. Sure, Toy Story was wonderful, but you have to understand, I was at school when it came out, and when our usual teachers were off, or we were nearing the end of term, it was Toy Story that the substitutes resorted to; Toy Story in mean little half-hour chunks, again and again and again. This one VHS would do the rounds - from class to class and back - so often I swear there were times I had to splice the tape together. So too much of a good thing... all that. To be honest I got a bit sick of your first film.

But hey. It wasn't you, baby - it was me.

Mind you, I can't be held responsible for A Bug's Life. What was that, eh Pixar?

Never mind. I didn't; not for long at least. Because after that one little misstep, you just kept getting better... and better... and better. From Toy Story 2 through Monsters, Inc and on, finally, to Finding Nemo, which I could not at the time conceive of any possible improvement on.

Yet - bless your fluffy little lamp - you kept on at it. You gave us The Incredibles, which was super. Then came Cars: not the best thing since sliced bread, but at least it was better than A Bug's Life. That it to say, I didn't despise it like everyone else seemed to.

Anyway, onwards... and upwards! So it was that our affair continued, with a string of original, touching, truly masterful films beginning with Ratatouille - foodie good times - and ending with Up, which featured a three-minute musical masterpiece that can still bring a tear to the eye of this grumpy old asshat here.

Between those two beauties, however, a movie that is and will I think forever be among my very, very favourite films: WALL-E. WALL-E was incredible. Perfectly judged, elegiac yet optimistic... just... just something else. I don't have the words, and here I'm meant to be all about the words.

But - though I hate to say it - something's happened to us since. Perhaps it was because you'd scaled such impossible heights, and the only place you could go was back. A third Toy Story was one thing, and it worked; against all the odds perhaps, but still, it worked: for a goodbye it was good, great even. Yet where did you head next? What did you do with all that affection? You took it back to Cars.

This Summer, with Cars 2, I fear you've forsaken much of what made you such a marvel in my eyes, Pixar. And alas, the road ahead looks equally uneven. First and foremost, what's all this about Monsters Academy? Can I just say no thanks now, save you the wait? And of late - twist the knife why don't you! - there's been talk of Toy Story 4 too, and a sequel to The Incredibles.

Pixar, my darling... my dear, sweet Pixar: what in the name of all that's rendered are you up to? Where do you think you're going in such a hurry?

Deep into the annals of the damned Mouse House, I dare say.

Please, enough with this nonsense. This new agenda of yours to push out two movies a year rather than the one beautifully polished gem that you've found such success with... it's a deeply misguided modus operandi. Certainly it is if all you mean to make of it are the very sequels you nearly broke up with Disney over, a couple of years ago.

I'll be plain: two shitty nothings do no make one great something. Give me Brave.

Brave could be brilliant - in fact, on the basis of that trailer and my faith in One Man Band director John Andrews, I full well expect it to be. But I beg of you, Pixar: never mind the rest of your slate. Stop right there and save us all the heartache. Take a year out after Brave, or however long it takes for y'all to come up with something new and shiny and exciting rather than paving the way for the selfsame road to ruin you nearly went AWOL over in the dark part-ownership days.

Pixar, you've been with me for a long time. Through the happy times and the sad. And I know as well as anyone that all good things must come to and end, but... just... please... not like this.

Pretty please?

Hopefully yours,

Niall Alexander.

We Interrupt This Broadcast | Good China, Bad Blogger

Guess who's back?

Not that I actually went away anywhere; in fact I've been sat here pretty much the whole time, twiddling my thumbs. As you'll know if you read the public service announcement from last week, or if you've been following me on Twitter in the interim, the real culprit - the not-so-secret cause of this unfortunate signal loss - was my broken, beaten, battle-scarred old computer.

Me, I'm all about fixing shit. Most days I'm even pretty decent at the Humpty Dumpty art of taking things apart and putting them back together. But this time, alas... there was nothing I could do. Her fan spun its last and soon afterwards she closed her eyes; slipped away. At least she went out well. If she did not die in battle, like the heroes in the storybooks, at least there was a sort of grace to it. A sense of stillness... of peace.

Because goddamn! My old dead computer was a noisy motherfucker.

Anyway, it was a sad day. An ugly day. And an expensive day, for though it hurt my heart to replace old faithful so soon, I had a job to do. Several, even - not least feeding this here habit of mine - and I knew the world would not likely wait.

So here we are. Again. Missed you guys! :)

Do stay tuned for a bit of a moan about Pixar later today, and tomorrow, at long last, my review of Low Town by Daniel Polansky.

Meantime, let me wish any and all new visitors who've come by way of Floor to Ceiling Books - and I see there've been a few of you moved by Amanda's kindly call to arms - a warm Scottish welcome, complete with Glasgow kisses that you'll thank me for not delivering in person.

If only I'd had some advance warning, I'd have whipped out the good china and all! Alas, these words of mine will have to do. Here's hoping you like what you see.

As for the rest of you: thanks, everyone, for your patience. And how the hell have you all been in my absence?

Video Game Review | Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, dev. Capcom

You've never played anything like Ghost Trick before. You mightn't ever again.

Ghost Trick is that rarest of treasures in the industry today: an honest to God original experience. It's not a first-person shooter or a third-person button masher. It's not a cutesy platformer or a character action game revelling in its own grim viscera. If it reminds one of anything, it's the pixel-hunting puzzlers of yore, but even that old genre, as we understand it, bears only a passing resemblance to Ghost Trick. From the creator, writer and director of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and the selfsame developers who so memorably brought that franchise to life, Ghost Trick is a thing to be held high; championed and celebrated for its daring in an era when only the biggest and the smallest studios can in real terms afford to bring anything even remotely novel to the table.

However.

It won't be for everyone. In fact, I don't know that it'll be for many folks at all. The madcap whimsy of the Phoenix Wright series is in full effect here - in overdrive, even -  and at times, it's positively unbearable, particularly considering the poor pacing, and the unique mechanics of Ghost Trick which regularly require that you play through a scene multiple times.

But let's get into those mechanics, before we get too far ahead of ourselves. Ghost Trick casts you as a recently deceased spirit. You don't know who you were in life, or how you died, or what the circumstances might have been -- and there's no going back, either. The goal of Ghost Trick isn't to win your way back to the land of the living, by hook or by crook, but to uncover the whys and the wherefores of your untimely expiration. In so doing, you'll unpick the component parts of a largely ridiculous conspiracy, stop an execution, and save a handful of lives. Just not your own.

You'll do that because you're a ghost, and ghosts... have tricks. But of course they do! Sissel - that's our man with the sharp red suit and the shock of blond hair - is able to move from inanimate object to inanimate object, manipulating each as he goes in order to somehow save and so interrogate certain characters who happen to know something about the murder with which Ghost Trick begins: yours. You'll find most objects, when possessed, have unique properties: you might be able to switch on a light, for instance, or swivel a chair, but you can't switch on chairs or swivel lights. Gameplay in Ghost Trick is thus a process of travelling from core to core through a series of arenas to find just the right object, or rather series of objects, with which to avert disaster.

If not in explanation, it's a simple enough concept in action. By the end of the first set-piece - of which there are about twenty in total - you'll have a firm enough understanding of how to play Ghost Trick that the next ten tutorial levels threaten to wear out one's patience. Only when the Rube Goldberg machines get to be mind-bogglingly complex and certain other ghost tricks start factoring into the equation does Ghost Trick represent a real challenge. And by then, which is to say after the halfway mark, it feels like too little, too late.

I game a lot of games, and as such, I want very much for the medium to embrace a greater breadth of experiences. Ghost Trick is a genuinely new sub-species of game, and few things would give me more pleasure at this point in time than to say, to hell with all its problems: pile on in. Because the more folks that buy Ghost Trick, the more Ghost Tricks there will be - is there a single industry more defined by supply and demand, I wonder? - and if you can tolerate the exhausting introduction, what lies beyond all the hand-holding is a fantastic new mechanic I'd quite like to play with again, please and thank-you.

But I don't know that I can honestly recommend this first flourish. Perhaps it's a necessary evil. Perhaps it's merely paving the way for better balanced things to come. However, if the thought of eight hours of camp-as-it-comes anime starring a proliferation of household pets interspersed with four of tutorials which will surely bore you just to get to that amount of time again of actual gaming goodness... if that doesn't sound like the sort of thing you're likely to appreciate, maybe best not to bother with Ghost Trick.

Short Fiction Corner | "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" by Mira Grant

A couple of months back, Orbit Short Fiction blinked into existence.

There was much ado about the programme before its launch, and I'm sure it's been getting by alright, but from where I'm sitting, I've seen precious little about Orbit Short Fiction since.

So, between very much enjoying Feed, and very much looking forward to enjoying Deadline just as soon as I can put away a few evenings to do the second book of the Newsflesh justice, I bought - for buttons - a copy Mira Grant's hot short. Coming in at under 4,000 words, "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" sounded just the ticket to tide me over.

My mistake...

"Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is about a group of friends who have been meeting up every Friday night for all their adult lives to roleplay the end of the world. Every week, one of the friends paints a picture of the apocalypse, and the others must decide how they'd overcome it - or at the very least else survive it. On the 683rd such evening, Cole, in absentia, presents a viral scenario that would be bog standard were it not for its cold, hard plausibility.

"It's just sick," says one of the gang as the tape recorder containing Cole's last message to them plays out. Suddenly her absence seems conspicuous, and alarm bells start ringing... but it is already too late?

Well, yes. Yes it is.

"Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is executed with all the accessibility we've come to expect from Mira Grant - the pseudonym of urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire - but precious little of the panache. And the payoff, whether in terms of narrative or character, is sadly something of a nothing.

Evidently unequal to the task of communicating personality or import in such a short space of time, Grant resorts to an old and exhausted formula: there is the set-up, then the explication, then the reveal. Apocalypse twist!

And there's some dreadfully clumsy composition, most notably:

"Cole stopped again before starting back up, sounding more and more like a broken marionette."

I mean, really? Seriously?  I'm not often so pedantic - and it's a perfectly appropriate image, I'll give Grant that - but exactly how does one sound like a broken marionette? Methinks someone should have returned this simile to sender...

In the end, "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is a neat idea, and not a great deal else. It could have made for an fine bonus feature in one or another of Grant's novels, but as it is, sold as a standalone short story, "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is slight and not at all satisfying. But at a buck (or $2) for a bit of fun, you know; easy come, easy go.

Now where could my copy of Deadline have gotten to...

Book Review | Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell

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An Antarctic research camp discovers and thaws the ancient, frozen body of a crash-landed alien. The creature revives with terrifying results, shape-shifting to assume the exact form of animal and man, alike. Paranoia ensues as a band of frightened men work to discern friend from foe, and destroy the menace before it challenges all of humanity! 

***

Was The Thing the first movie I ever bought on Blu-ray? I think it might just have been...


I'm an unabashed fan - what can I say? I must have seen John Carpenter's adaptation of Who Goes There? twenty times or more, all told - any excuse is a good excuse - and without fail, whenever in recent memory the credits have scrolled I've made a mental note to hunt out the tale upon which The Thing is based. Oh, and Howard Hawks' 1950s monstrosity The Thing From Another World. That too.


Yet till now, I never did...


...and I'm kind of wishing I never had, at all.


Because it's a pretty tepid novella. Even having made the usual allowances one must for fiction from another era, Who Goes There? seemed to me forgettable pulp - certainly not the "timeless genre classic" (p.10) Logan's Run author William F. Nolan describes in his punchy introduction. Its characters, of which there's something of an over-abundance, are to a one so thin as to appear transparent; and though the notional concept at its core, of an alien desperate to see its species survive after untold millennia frozen in a glacier, still hits home - particularly the shape-shifting and the subsequent paranoia Carpenter made so much of - Campbell seems leagues more interested in exploiting every last drop of the melodrama the premise entails, and haplessly documenting some talking heads talking nonsense.


Perhaps it wasn't always nonsense they were talking... perhaps it's dreadfully crass of me to assert as much. But even allowing for the foibles of such fiction in the late thirties, Who Goes There? is unequal to any variety of comparison with Carpenter's masterful adaptation. The bare bones of the story are there, at least, but the film fashions a body around those bones - developing the potential of certain threads of character and narrative Campbell seems profoundly uninterested in, and abandoning those others than simply do not work - where the author of the original novella is content to present a picked-clean corpse.


Rocket Ride Books, however, have gone above and beyond with this edition of Who Goes There? Let's give the small press start-up credit where credit's been duly earned, because Campbell's novella is but one part of the classy package they've put together - and were it that alone, I might still recommend it, whatever its failings, as a curiosity to fans of either film version.


But the Rocket Ride reissue of Who Goes There? goes the extra mile, coming complete with the informative introduction aforementioned, and a whole other thing: the spec script William F. Nolan wrote for Universal Studios' consideration in the late 70s, when they were sniffing around the idea of another adaptation. So not the screen treatment John Carpenter used a few years later - that was from the pen of the late and lamented Bill Lancaster - but a third distinct take on Campbell's tale; an iteration more straightforwardly science fictional than either of the others, and wreathed in Americana. I'm glad, ultimately, that Nolan's script wasn't the basis of The Thing, but assuredly it makes for a fascinating what if?


For collectors, then, the value-packed Rocket Ride edition of Who Goes There? should make for a no-brainer of a buy. It'll be a harder sell to those with less interest in the cinematic lineage of John W. Campell's original story - poised to continue, against all odds, in a very promising prequel slated for later in 2011 - though those potential readers too would be well advised to look beyond the pulpy melodrama of Who Goes There? itself to the pitch-perfect extra features and deleted scenes of this bounteous re-release.

***

Who Goes There?

by John W. Campbell

UK and US Publication: April 2009, Rocket Ride Books


Buy this book from

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